How to Install the OpenBox Window Manager on the OLPC XO

Preamble

Given up on Sugar (at least for now)? Finding even XFCE a little bit slow?

This guide is for you. It's neither simple nor quick, but the effort put into installing OpenBox on your OLPC will be richly rewarded.

NOTE: This guide does not uninstall the base fedora operating system and need not uninstall sugar either, so keep in mind that if all else fails you'll have lost naught but 40 recoverable megabytes and a few hours.

Installing Openbox

Settle down into a comfortable position, boot your olpc, connect to a wireless network, and prepare to install from source.

NOTE: If you want to remove sugar, it's recommended to first do a clean install from a flash drive. Go ahead, try 8.2.0. It won't bite.

After connecting to the internet, switch to the alternate console (Ctrl-Alt-F2, where F2 is the three-dotted Neighborhood button) and prepare to install some dependencies and necessities:

Modify the local startup file, which is a copy of /home/olpc/.xsession-example:

nano /home/olpc/.xsession

After the line reading '#xterm' insert on a new line 'openbox-session'. If you want to boot sugar, remove that new line or put a # in front of it.

Reboot using the command line:

shutdown -r now

NOTE: If you use -h instead of -r the computer will instead shutdown. Since I haven't figured out another way to shutdown from openbox, remember this.

Basic OpenBox Setup

After the white screen of the X server starting, you'll get your first exciting transition to...the gray screen of openbox. OpenBox, you see, is solely a window manager, and that means no built-in background, file manager, volume manager...and also incredible speed.

But you're probably wondering what to do at this point, so! Right-click on the desktop to get your first real taste of OpenBox. There is an application menu loaded with many many options that you don't have, and one that you now do: xterm, under Terminals. Click on it and a terminal in a horrible eye-killing font will open. Luckily you won't need it for long, as we're going to be using the wonderful sakura terminal emulator. It's really just a cover for vte, just like Sugar's terminal, but it's fast and small